Saturday, October 28, 2006

no additional anthrax briefings to Congress

"Congress and the FBI are now openly battling over the pace and direction of the anthrax investigation.

Late Monday, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a damning six-page letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales requesting a briefing on the FBI investigation, now five years old. The letter faults the agency for its handling of the case, saying "the FBI has little in the way of results to show for its work."

Meanwhile, in an unusual move, the FBI's top lobbyist has informed members of Congress that the bureau will no longer brief them on the case. The FBI's Assistant Director for Congressional Affairs wrote, "After sensitive information about the investigation citing congressional sources was reported in the media, the Department of Justice and the FBI agreed that no additional briefings to Congress would be provided."[]Meanwhile, the FBI recently installed a new team of top investigators to head up the anthrax case. Sources familiar with the case tell NBC News that the new managers are looking anew at all possible suspects, with a much broader focus than before. The sources say that the previous head of the case, inspector Richard Lambert, was moved to a new position within the FBI, in part because he had focused too much on Hatfill."

* you can read grassley's letter here (pdf) - half of it sounds like he is fighting sibel's fight still.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I've always wondered why John Bolton made those accusations about anthrax and Cuba and then mysteriously, the subject disappeared from public discussion.

A refresher:

On May 6, 2002 Bolton, then Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, in a speech to the rightwing Heritage Foundation claimed that Cuba had a program to produce offensive biological weapons. The Bush administration, he declared, “believes Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort,” and has “provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states.” His talk, entitled “Beyond the Axis of Evil” (recall that the term had been introduced just three months earlier by President Bush in his State of the Union rant), followed charges by anti-Castro Cuban-American organizations that a joint Cuba-Iran pharmaceutical research venture was actually a front for the development of such weapons. The press made a big deal of the talk, the shameless neocon groupie Judith Miller of the New York Times reporting, “Bush administration officials report that the United States believes that Cuba has been experimenting with anthrax and other deadly biological pathogens.”

I've heard so many stories about anthrax and weapons generally, I can't keep up with them and don't try. You could fill a library with them. I'm glad you brought up Bolton's name. This is like the story the other day about Rice trying to start trouble between the Syrians and Iraq's northern Kurds.

Did you ever stop to think how many man hours go into planning these myths? What about Bolton, Rice and people like them--do they get supplemental pay for this work, or do they do it out of the blackness in their hearts? But the big money question is, why is the U.S. government so concerned about other countries' possessing biological or nuclear weapons when all that technology comes from backroom deals made by republicans from the United States?

It comes as a surprise to me, but I suppose it shouldn't. If you've been reading Robert Parry's articles about the October surprise, you're aware that Bush, Sr. et al. were trading more than airplane tires to make a deal to spring the hostages. How do you think Pakistan, India, North Korea and China got their nuclear programs off the ground? The relationship is more than casual or coincidental--good, religious, conservative American republicans made it happen. They have their proxies and straw men, but the trail always leads back to the same place.

Decade after decade, they try ever so hard to keep it quiet, but I knew they were doing it in the late 70s. Do you suppose Valerie Plame was outed just as retribution for Joe's Niger yellowcake assessment? It's hard to think that was the only reason, when in the normal course of her work she stumbled over one George Bush body after another, suggesting that what is such a closely held secret here is rather common knowledge abroad. The God-forsaken Bush family has been the major force behind the proliferation of biological and nuclear weapons in the world. They betrayed their duty as public servants in favor of personal profit, making the world far more dangerous as they committed treason against America. And now Dubya's minions want to fight wars about it?? They are traitors, more surely than anyone ever was, and deserve execution.